Parents as Inspirers

Ask anyone in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, about the annual end-of-summer agricultural fairs and you will be told that
they are serious business. They’re fun, too. Our town’s fair begins with a parade. The streets are lined with
enthusiastic faces. Three days of exhibits on the fairgrounds follow. Ferris wheels and all other rides are barred from
the fair, and so are prize stalls. Therefore no ticket stubs litter the ground.

The fair is free. Many volunteer to run it. Many more enter. When we had recently moved to our town, the first time we visited
the fair and stepped into an exhibit hall, I was astounded. I wasn’t expecting to see so many entries, so carefully
crafted by both children and adults (displayed safely under plastic). Within moments a tear filled my eye. I couldn’t
help it. But I wiped it away instantly, not wishing to appear emotional in public. I was impressed. The most wonderful thing
is that I felt inspired.

I examined the knitting, sewn garments, quilts, and embroidery and knew from experience the unmarked hours that had gone
into each entry. I marveled at what was home grown. Flowers more beautiful than in a florist shop. Whole rows of fruits,
vegetables, herbs, baked goods, and preserves glowed more appealingly fresh and delicious than what can be bought at the
grocery store. Indeed things are still made in the USA—as long as there are pumpkins …

Never had I seen such fastidiously groomed and healthy dairy cows and other farm animals. I couldn’t help notice their
owners, the young people, who handled their animals with pride and confidence.

The aisles of amateur photographs, the tables of crafts, and a wall of paintings spoke to me that people have found things
to like about their world—enough to capture it in art. The dreary, murmuring attitude of “why bother”
was put to shame.

The key word here is inspiration. Those who put the work and care into making an entry in the agricultural
fair had to have been inspired by someone. From whence do you derive your inspiration?

Our Educational Responsibilities

To educate is to inspire. It is to sustain the inner life of a child with ideas. Ideas come by inspiration. We find them
in books and experiences. As home teachers we are tempted (when exhausted) to tackle our educational responsibilities with
the burdensome view of getting through a stack of educational materials: so much needs to be covered before the week is
out, before the semester is out, before the year is out.

A Yoke That Is Easy

I once mentioned in A Charlotte Mason Companion: It isn’t how much a child covers that matters
most but how much he cares. When we understand that education is much, much more than the three R’s
or more than covering all the material, we are refitted with a yoke that is easy. We are more willingly harnessed
to the task and work faithfully, carefully, and lovingly. Why does the yoke seem easier? We recognize the importance of
our call and have taken on a special role. Parents are to be inspirers.

A Child’s First Copybook

By the very lives we live, we are sowing seeds of ideas in our children. A sobering old proverb states: “Parents are
a child’s first copybook.” Because we love our children, we seek God to help us demonstrate understanding, kindness,
patience, cheerfulness, hard work, and reverence in our homes. How else can children learn how to show these to others?
Through books, written by people inspired by ideas, we give children what is pure, lovely, noble, and just to think about.
Books alive with ideas do the teaching.

“Right thought flows upon the stimulus of an idea, and ideas are stored … in books and pictures and the lives
of men and nations; these instruct the conscience and stimulate the will.”1

Passing on the Torch

A good schoolbook shows us what virtue looks like. Textbooks do the job of offering us facts, but seldom do they go into
the interesting detail of discovery, invention, or spiritual awakening. So we rely on other sorts of books to inspire us.
This fallen world is not all sweetness. Therefore we reach for books that accompany life’s hard truths with hope.

In literature, we meet sorrow, but we ought also to meet large-hearted characters that comfort. In history and biography
we meet those who destroy, so we look for those brave souls who build, defend, or minister the gospel. Science rises to
meet the challenge of hardship and sickness, and so we read about the inventors and the healers. Inspiration comes by way
of those who uncover truth and pass on the flaming torch of ideas (especially needed in dark places). Some day our children
may be one of the torchbearers.

Charlotte Mason borrows language from Ecclesiastics when she tells us: “The duty of parents is to sustain a child’s
inner life with ideas as they sustain his body with food. The child is an eclectic; he may choose this or that; therefore,
in the morning sow thy seed, and in the evening withhold not thy hand, for thou knowest not which shall prosper …
”2

Biographical Information

Home educators know Karen Andreola by her groundbreaking book A Charlotte Mason Companion.
Karen taught her three children through high school–studying with them all the many wonderful things her own education
was missing. The entire Andreola family writes product reviews for
Rainbow Resource Center. Knitting mittens and sweaters and cross-stitching historic samplers are activities
enjoyed in Karen’s leisure. For encouraging ideas, visit her blog:
www.momentswithmotherculture.blogspot.com.

Copyright 2012, used with permission. All rights reserved by author. Originally appeared in the September 2012 issue of
The Old Schoolhouse® Magazine, the family education magazine. Read the magazine free at
www.TOSMagazine.com or read it on the go and download the free apps at
www.TOSApps.com to read the magazine on your mobile devices.

Homeschooling When It’s Harder Than You Bargained For

When we begin homeschooling, we can’t always foresee that inevitably there will be months, perhaps even years, that
threaten to sink us. We start with a plan, whether it’s a preorganized and carefully controlled curriculum, or an
eclectic mix we’ve pieced together ourselves with our children’s strengths and weaknesses in mind.

We design our days to give us the most bang for our buck, stacking schoolwork together in the morning to get it all done
and to leave us room for the non-negotiables such as laundry and meal prep or the fun stuff like dance lessons and sports
teams. Once we get in a groove, our school days can run like a well-oiled machine.

And then life unfolds.

I had been officially homeschooling for one year when I became pregnant with our fourth child and the sixteen weeks of unrelenting
morning sickness kicked in. I would fill big Tupperware bowls with Cheerios and leave them on the floor of my bedroom so
my kids could feed themselves breakfast while watching Sesame Street. I couldn’t muster the strength to get out of
bed, day after day, week after week. Still, school had to happen. Life was progressing with or without me, no matter how
many times per day I found myself crouched over the toilet.

A child who screamed for the first fifteen months of her life. A coyote attack on our chicken coop. A baby in a coma. An
accident involving our twelve-passenger van and a 5-year-old. A ruptured appendix and three weeks in the hospital. I’m
not waxing poetic or pulling examples out of my imagination; these are the events that have marked the fourteen years of
our homeschooling. These are the real experiences that occurred when we least expected them and always by the grand sovereign
design of the One Who loves us most.

I didn’t plan for my school years to go in such a direction, but God did, and I am thankful for the refining He has
done in our family as a result. You won’t always be able to plan for hardship either, but be on the lookout for it;
this homeschooling endeavor can be way harder than we bargained for.

My friends, sisters Catherine and Caroline, have spent this last year at the mercy of their father’s cancer. He was
an attentive, Godly dad whom they adored and who enjoyed a meaningful marriage with their mother. His diagnosis was devastating
to them all, even with the knowledge that his eternity was secure in the arms of Jesus. Months of driving three hours one-way
to the VA hospital each week, strokes that took away his ability to speak, cancer that racked his body with pain and weight
loss and horror.

Catherine is a self-professed control freak who had a difficult time laying her homeschool agenda aside during the time that
she so dearly wanted to be caring for her dad. She wrote to me:

As my dad’s illness progressed quickly, the importance of spending quality time with him became more important than
keeping up with schooling. God brought a desire to my heart to show my daughters a different kind of lesson and that was
one of serving others. Dad lived in our house until the day he died. My kids learned in all those months how to care for
someone who was very ill. They kissed my dad’s bald head and hugged him and told him they loved him. They read books
with him, and we also did a number of lessons in The Mystery of History together. Even after my dad lost the ability to
speak, he still fumbled through the pages of his Bible in search of the perfect verse to share with my kids about what we
had just studied. It was awesome!

When Dad couldn’t feed himself or when he had food dribbling down his face, the girls learned to help feed him or gently
wipe his face. When his final days on earth were here, my kids and their cousins boldly stood at the foot of his bed and
sang to him. They held his boney hands and they kissed his sunken cheeks. They told their grandpa how much they loved him
and they spoke of the lessons he had taught them. Lessons of God’s grace, mercy and love.

While life was hard, we still schooled. We just did it very differently. Math and reading happened some days, but our main
focus became our family and the place the Lord had us at that moment—smack dab in the middle of my dad’s illness.
Dad needed his family, so we studied life lessons that taught strength and character. My kids learned how to be compassionate
and caring in the most difficult of circumstances. They watched as our family did their best to glorify the Lord. But most
importantly they learned that God has a purpose in everything and that He is always good.

Catherine didn’t plan for her school year to go in such a direction, but God did, and she is thankful for the refining
He has done in their family as a result. The lessons learned this year by their entire family are life-changing and lifelong.

And then there’s Dana, who has been homeschooling her four children for the past ten years. Last year her sister’s
children suddenly came to be in her home, and she instantly had three new students. Dana had to rethink everything, including
the curriculum she had chosen for her own children. She’s had to relinquish control and learn to listen to God:

Yes, I have had to learn to depend on Him. Homeschooling alone will do that to a person. But it takes the trials and harder
times to really cement what you know is true. That the one true God is dependable, in control, and will write on your page
what is His best for you. I feel inadequate to do what He has called us to do because I know my hang-ups. I feel tighter
with Him because He asked this of us and made it clear we must totally depend on Him. I had big plans for this school year.
God had bigger ones. I had to look at what He gave me and willingly set mine aside. His were better, for our best.

And that’s always the key, isn’t it? In the toughest, most trying times, when we feel we cannot possibly do what
God is calling us to do, He refashions, remakes, rewrites, and redeems. We have to remind ourselves that in and above it
all stands the God Who loves us more than we will ever love ourselves or each other, and that He has written our stories
for His glory. Our plans are good if they are a means to an end, but if they become the means that undo us because we cannot
rejoice in the afflictions that change the course of those plans, we are in bondage to a dream of homeschooling that was
never God’s intention.

He loves you unimaginably, and maybe most especially, because when you are weak, He is strong.

Deuteronomy 7:9: “Know therefore that the Lord your God is God; he is the faithful God, keeping his covenant of love
to a thousand generations of those who love him and keep his commandments … .”

Biographical Information

Kendra Fletcher is the homeschooling mother of eight, aged 19 down to 4. She has never known what it means to homeschool
without the presence of preschoolers and loves to encourage other moms who are beginning their homeschool journeys with
little ones underfoot. Kendra reviews for the TOS Homeschool Crew and is the author of a popular E-Book about creating a
Circle Time for your homeschool. Her website and blog can be found at www.preschoolersandpeace.com.

Copyright 2012, used with permission. All rights reserved by author. Originally appeared in the October 2012 issue of
The Old Schoolhouse® Magazine, the family education magazine. Read the magazine free at
www.TOSMagazine.com or read it on the go and download the free apps at
www.TOSApps.com to read the magazine on your mobile devices